131–140 of 165 posts
What do we do next time? 18 months of shutting down the economy again? What if it happens again in just a few years?
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Well, the pox, diphteria and polio are gone or almost gone due to vaccinations, at one point or the other we had herd immunity with those. Its just that some small pockets of society refused to vaccinate and played incubators, so the rest of us wouldn't miss all the "fun"... Quite the same for all the other diseases you enumerated, just that we never managed to get herd immunity due to antivaxxers ruining it.
Or even worse than antivaxxers, the actual vaccinations being given in a mass rollout: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/08/25/9058847... "It's actually an interesting conundrum. The very tool you are using for [polio] eradication is causing the problem"
So yes, you are right that there are some corner cases.
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I don't really wanna be part of a society that sacrifices the old and unfit at the expense of the whatever point you are trying to make. 500,000 COVID deaths across the country shouldn't be taken lightly. I am surprised if you are taking all "scientists" as a collective group that you are focusing on early attempts to create models rather than the delivery of a vaccine (by scientists) and overall improvement of disea…
I don't understand this reasoning, it's such hyperbole, we are not sacrificing anyone. You are already part of a society that makes these types of tradeoffs and calculated risks all the time. We don't spend an endless amount of money on extending everyone's life at any cost. And people who are overweight and unfit have a personal responsibility as well, and can also isolate themselves, why do we have to traumatise a…
[1] Notice how all the worrying variants are from countries with inadequate lockdowns?
It will be different this time!!(says the media) I like to base my findings on history and previous pandemics and how they were dealt with. The swine flu of 1918-1919[1] which was more deadly(IFR rate 2% [2]) than covid-19(IFR rate 1.15% [3]) did in fact go away, it was the last major pandemic the world has endured and once herd immunity is reached the virus will no longer have any "tinder" to burn through as either…
The mutation rate of this coronavirus is also 1/4 per base pair and 1/2 per whole genome of influenza. That is fairly comparable to influenza (given that viral mutation rates span many orders of magnitude they're practically the same).
The variants with the mutations in spike which have higher binding affinity to ACE2 suggest that the virus also has "room to mutate". OTOH, there are 20-ish epitopes on the spike protein and would need to mutate a bunch to achieve complete immune escape. Depending on what wild-assed-guess you take as to which of those is more important you'll come up with the likelihood of if it'll mutate to achieve immune escape or not. Anyone who says they know the answer -- no matter how many degrees they have and books and papers they've published -- is lying (they may wind up being correct, but to assert they know the answer right now is a lie).
Since HCoV-NL63 has been endemic to the human race for likely centuries and similarly binds ACE2 my guess is that this coronavirus will also become endemic.
Given the H1N1 is now seasonal influenza and that HCoV-NL63 is a common cold coronavirus this is likely what is going to happen to SARS-CoV-2 now:
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Well, we are already at roughly .04% worldwide deaths, and that with quite some doing to contain the disease in most of the world. I would suggest that letting COVID-19 run it's course, the numbers would be quite a bit higher, and even with current measures in place and vaccinations underway, we will certainly exceed .06% by the end of the year.
Is it possible however they are attributing death counts in 1890 are different than they are today? Maybe if they used the same standards for who dies today that they did in 1890 the n umbers back then could be higher?
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>seems the answer is to genetically engineer a weak variant with a bigger reproduction and let it rip? A weaker varient of a disease often just is the vaccine. As for letting her rip? I'd imagine the concern is future mutations that the vaccine can't surpress with it bouncing between people.
yes but we are unable to vaccinate fast enough. virus is n^2, vaccine is n you cannot beat exponential growth with linear growth
If I'd have to guess, I'd say it is O(R^n)
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How are masks 99% effective against the seasonal flu, but not nearly as effective against COVID-19?
Easy, it takes less exposure to COVID to get you ill. Meaning, it's a more infectious disease. And masks aren't ineffective against COVID-19. Everyone wearing a mask does a pretty good job at preventing the spread of disease. However, there are a lot of people that aren't as strict about following mask rules and guidelines.
If there is, in addition, a partial immunity, e.g. from a former flu infection, the threshold for the necessary viral load to cause a disease is even higher. Which is why masks are usually more effective against the flu.
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Does COVID vaccination prevent infection and transmission?
Yes, it certainly looks that way: https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-israel-va... https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-pfizer...
Both of those factors make COVID vaccination quite different from, say, measles vaccination (~97% prevention, lifelong immunity), and seemingly more similar to the flu vaccine, which is not required by any schools (that I know of).
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I don't understand this reasoning, it's such hyperbole, we are not sacrificing anyone. You are already part of a society that makes these types of tradeoffs and calculated risks all the time. We don't spend an endless amount of money on extending everyone's life at any cost. And people who are overweight and unfit have a personal responsibility as well, and can also isolate themselves, why do we have to traumatise a…
We could have had a hard strong lockdown in early 2020, but people like you made the arguments you're making now, and so we've had a see-saw year of restrictions being imposed and lifted, and here we are: the economy's fucked, huge numbers of people are dead, we have new variants[1] in circulation, and we're now saying "let's just kill off anyone who'd, or obese, or has diabetes, or asthma". [1] Notice how all the wo…
"huge" numbers of people are not dead, look at excessive mortality, adjusted for population, compare 15 years back. Lo and behold we have had several deadlier years.
In Germany all restrictions were lifted for six months and nothing happened, then suddenly infections went up when the weather got cold and OMG it's because we let people go out. Then we lift the restrictions slightly and now when infections go up again, following the next spell of cold weather, we are certain that it was because we let some people go to the hair dresser.
First and foremost SARS-CoV-2 will never go away because it infects animals. Because it is so infectious, it will go through an entire herd or farm within days and eventually cause mutations and jump back to humans. So it will never go away and we need to prepare for it. The main goal is to make it survivable, ie. akin to the flu, and not cause hospitals to get overrun like we have seen so many times around the world…
unless we vaccinate animals too?